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NASA's Chief Bails Out

Sean O'Keefe had the extreme bad luck to take the helm of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration less than 14 months before the shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas, throwing the agency into disarray. Through no great fault of his own, Mr. O'Keefe is leaving the space program in worse shape than he found it. The remaining shuttles are still grounded for safety repairs, the space station they service is a shrunken shell and the agency has been given a challenging long-term mandate for space exploration with little new money to carry it out. Mr. O'Keefe announced recently that he would soon depart for a high-paying job as chancellor of Louisiana State University. He will bequeath to his successor a daunting array of half-finished tasks as the American space program struggles to get back on course.

The irony is that Mr. O'Keefe's impact has been virtually the opposite of what was initially expected. A self-described "bean counter" who had been deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, he was appointed to NASA in December 2001 to bring its finances under control after the International Space Station program was staggered by a projected overrun of almost $5 billion. The chief worry voiced by space enthusiasts was that he would bring an accountant's mentality to an agency that needed bold vision. As it turned out, he is leaving the agency's finances still mired in confusion but played a role, yet to be spelled out, in shaping the exploration vision put forth by the White House.

The dominant feature of his three-year tenure was the disastrous loss of the Columbia, which had an impact on virtually every decision he made thereafter. The accident reflected deep-seated problems at the agency that predated Mr. O'Keefe's arrival, as well as the fragility and age of the shuttle fleet. The investigating board assigned Mr. O'Keefe some blame for setting rigid deadlines that led shuttle personnel to cut corners and defer dealing with the problem with foam insulation that brought down the Columbia. But no one accused him of being a prime cause of the accident, and it could have happened whoever was in charge.

The initial task assigned to Mr. O'Keefe -- to right NASA's finances -- is still a work in progress. He reined in the costs of the space station mostly by shrinking its size and crew to the point where its value is marginal. The agency's financial claims still strain credulity. For the 2003 fiscal year, NASA thought it had almost $2 billion more in its accounts than the Treasury Department said it had, a discrepancy NASA resolved by reducing its figures to match Treasury's. The agency has been hit with a barrage of critical reports from the Government Accountability Office and its own inspector general. Its outside auditor has refused to certify its accounting because it cannot justify the numbers. And the Office of Management and Budget recently gave NASA's financial management a red light, its lowest rating. Some of these problems can be attributed to what Mr. O'Keefe describes as the "hellacious challenge" of merging many separate, often archaic accounting systems into a single core financial system. His successor will have to stay on top of this transition if NASA's notoriously optimistic cost estimates are to have any credibility in coming years.

Mr. O'Keefe's chief legacy, if it comes to fruition, may turn out to be the space exploration vision announced by President Bush in January. The sketchy plans call for a new crew vehicle to succeed the shuttles, a landing on the Moon by 2020, and ultimately moving on to Mars and beyond. Historians will have to sort out whether Mr. O'Keefe, whose hands were already full with shuttle and space station problems, was an initiator of this vision or was pulled into it by a White House staff eager to meet the clamor for clear goals in space after the Columbia disaster. Either way, he helped shape the vision and the plans to carry it out. What he did not get was much money to get started -- an average of $200 million a year in new money over the next five years, forcing NASA to cannibalize about $11 billion from other programs over the same period.

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His biggest mistake was his decision to cancel a planned shuttle mission to service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's most important scientific instrument, before its batteries and gyroscopes die out. Although Mr. O'Keefe insists the cancellation was based on safety concerns, it seems likely that the mission was sacrificed because the shuttles are needed to complete the space station so that the path can be cleared for the new exploration program. Mr. O'Keefe hoped to service the Hubble with a chancy robotic mission. His successor ought to ensure that Hubble survives even if a shuttle has to be used.

As a first priority, the agency has to get its shuttle fleet back up and running, a task that has taken longer and cost more than originally hoped. It must then expeditiously complete the space station. And it must change the cultural habits and organizational patterns that were blamed for contributing to the accident, a task that has barely started. One wonders how far any cultural change will go given that no one seems to have been held accountable for bad judgments that led to the Columbia disaster.

By many accounts, Mr. O'Keefe has raised the morale of NASA employees dispirited by the shuttle accident. With the help of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, the agency got almost its full budget request for the 2005 fiscal year while most other civilian agencies suffered cuts. These are encouraging developments that should help the next administrator meet a very tough set of challenges.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on December 26, 2004, on Page 4004008 of the National edition with the headline: NASA's Chief Bails Out. Today's Paper|Subscribe